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Marxism: The basic Components of the Doctrine:

Marxism is the gamut of economic, social and political theories formulated by Karl Marx186 and Friedrich Engels187, stressing the doctrine of dialectical materialism188, class struggle, the labour theory of value and the inevitable decay of capitalism, leading to the goal of a class less society.189

Karl Heirich Marx was born in Germany at Trier in 1918 C.E. He studied various subjects including; law, history, philosophy and economics. The study of economics and history led him to conclude that society have always remained a composite of two antagonistic classes. One of which possessed the means of production and the other did not possess them. The later class could therefore, contribute towards the production process only with their physical and mental exertions. The exploitation of the labouring class by the proprietary class has been always the cause of the antagonism. Although the production methods have been

186

Karl Heinrich Marx was born in Germany at Trier in 1818. He studied law, history and philosophy at Bonn and Berlin universities and received his Ph. D at Jena in 1842. In the same year he married Jenny von Westphalen, stepsister of Ferdinand von Westphalen, a reactionary statesman: and was about to become an assistant professor in philosophy, when politics attracted him. He became a newspaper editor in cologne. The paper was banned in 1843 due to harsh criticism against government policies and Marx moved to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels. Working here as a journalist and a bitter critic, he was expelled from France in 1845. He went to Belgium and taught economics there for three years; and also wrote his first book, The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847. Here he also founded a German worker’s society and joined the Communist League. He moved to London in 1849, and lived there till death in 1883.

187 _{Fredric Engels (1820-1895) was born in Bremen. In 1944 he met Marx in France. The two became close friends} and collaborated on a number of works, the best known of which is the Communist Manifesto. Ed., David-L-Skills; International Encyclopedia of social Sciences (Macmillan Company and the Free Press 1968) vol.5, P.64.

188 _{Dialectical materialism is a socio- economic theory introduced by Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, according to} which; history and the forms of society are interpreted as the result of conflicts between social classes arising from the relations of the means of production. The new international Webster’s comprehensive Dictionary of English Language (Deluxe Encyclopedic edition) Trident press international, 2003 edition.

189

The New International Webster’s Comprehensive Dictionary of English Language (Deluxe Encyclopedic Edition) Trident press international 2003 edition,p.584.

changing with the passage of time, the two classes and their antagonism remained persistent. The struggle between the two classes will continue, until the cause of antagonism is removed. Marxian Doctrine is based upon the following main components.

i. Dialectical materialism; as the basis of all thoughts, ideas and actions.

ii. Historical materialism or Economic interpretation of history; as the only true explanation of all historical events and social behaviour.

iii. The Theory of surplus value; which explains how capital is the product of

labour and how capitalists usurp the surplus value from the labourers.

iv. End of capitalism; which expounds how capitalism will come to an end and how it will be replaced by the socialism.

Dialectical Materialism:

Dialectical method is an intellectual investigation. It was initiated by Socrates and developed by Hegal.190 It is based on the idea that there is a continuous opposition between two contradictory but interconnecting forces (thesis and antithesis) and their continual reconstruction takes place at a higher level (synthesis).191

Materialism is a theory, according to which physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and all beings, processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. In this doctrine the highest values or objective lie in material well being and in the development of material progress.192

190 _{Hegal was born in Germany (1770-1831). He taught the philosophy that the rational is the real and the real is} the rational. Opposites are essential elements of change as Heraclitus had believed. The pattern of change takes the form of triads; Thesis, Antithesis and synthesis. Ed. David l-Skills, op.cit, vol.6., p. 341

191 _{Ibid., p. 276} 192

Syed Muhammad Ismail, A Critical Analysis of Capitalism, Socialism and Islamic Economic order, Adam publishers and Distributers, 2008, p. 176.

Dialectical materialism is a Marxian theory, which asserts and maintains the material basis of a reality constantly changing in dialectical process and the priority of matter over mind. According to Engles:

“The great basic thought is that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of readymade things but, as a complex of processes in which the things apparently stable, no less than their mind image in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away.”193

He Continues:

“For it (dialectical philosophy) nothing is final, absolute, and sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away of endless ascendency from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflections of this process in the thinking brain.194” Thus, Marxism wants to assert on the basis of the law of dialectics that, the society has been in a continuous state of change and the modern capitalistic society, based on the law of dialects will once collapse down because, it contains some contradictory elements inherent in it, which will act as its antithesis and will finally replace it by socialism

Economic Interpretation of History:

Marx seeks to explain every event of history on economic ground. He provides an economic interpretation of history. According to Marx, man‟s relations are determined by the means of production. All wars, riots, and political movements have their Origen in the economic factors, he writes”

193

Karl Marx, Selected works, Foreign languages publishing House, Moscow, 1946, Vol.1, p. 359.

194

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of the society- the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determine their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness.”195

About the classes and class struggle, Marx asserts in the Communist Manifesto that, history of mankind is the history of class struggle. He writes, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, Lord and self, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or the common ruin of the contending classes.”196

Marx adds; that the modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonism. It has but established, new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. He further writes,

“Our epoch, the epoch of bourgeois possesses, however, this distinctive feature: It has simplified the class antagonism. Society as a whole is more and more splitting

195

Ibid., p.300

196

up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other- bourgeoisie and proletariat197.”

According to Marx, the hostility between the two classes will continue. He explains that, with the passage of time the capitalism will generate conditions which will replace it by socialism. The capitalists will grow in wealth as the time passes, but will become less in number. There will be a cut throat competition in which the lower capitalists will perish. This will result into monopolies and over production, which will necessitate markets abroad. This will lead to an imperialistic war, and one war will be followed by another, more terrible than the proceeding one, till capitalism perishes in the conflict and the dictatorship of proletariat is established.

The Theory of surplus value:

The third component of the Marxian doctrine is the theory of surplus value, which has become the pivot round which the entire Marxian economic analysis revolves. In his Das capital Marx begins with explaining the nature of the terms; use value and exchange value of a commodity. According to Marx, raw materials possess by their nature no exchange value. The exchange value in a natural raw material comes into existence only as a result of the rectification of human labour therein. He writes, “as the exchangeable values of commodities are only social functions of those things, and have nothing at all to do with their natural qualities, we must first ask: what is the common social substance of all commodities? It is labour. To produce a commodity certain amount of labour must, be bestowed upon it or worked upon it.198”

197

Ibid., p.34

198

However, the resultant effect of labour may vary from one person to another, due to the difference in their intelligence and aptitude as well as their commitment to excel others. Therefore, in order to remove this controversy, Marx uses the term social labour, he defines social labour as, “The labour time socially necessary is that, required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at that time.199”

Marx propounded his theory of surplus value on the basis of his theory of value. He says that, in order to enable labourer to carry on the work of production, he needs some instruments of production and other facilities, but he lacks these facilities. Hence, he has to sell his labour to the capitalist. However, the capitalist does not pay the labourer the full value of the product produced by him. A worker continues working even after the time he has put in labour worth its price. Sometimes he works for twelve hours where as six hour labour was enough to compensate the capitalist. Thus, work of labour force is not merely to produce value equal to its price but much more than it. Marx calls this extra value as „Surplus Value200_{‟. The surplus value is the difference between the market value of}

the commodity and the cost of the factors used in the production of the commodity. Marx says that the manufacturer gets for his commodity more than what he has spent on labour and other costs. By using this surplus value, the capitalist can get still more surplus. This surplus is the creation of labour. It is created because, labour is paid much less than is due to it .He characterizes the appropriation of the surplus value by the capitalist as robbery and exploitation .A commodity according

199

Karl Marx, Capital: A critical Analysis of Capitalist production, vol.,1 p. 39.

200

to him is simply a „crystallized labour‟ or „congealed labour‟. He writes, “All commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time201.

It this way the capitalist by the help of surplus value becomes richer and richer, and the exploitation of the working class is continuously increasing .Thus, Marx propounded his theory of exploitation on the basis of the theory of surplus value.

End of capitalism:

According to Marx, the forces that operate in the capitalist system lead to greater and greater exploitation of the laborers. The capitalists compete against one another in order to increase their profits. There are three ways of enhancing the exploitation, a) increasing the duration of the working day; when the period of working day is increased, total output increases, but the wages remain fixed. Thus, it leads to the enhanced exploitation. b) Surplus value is increased by the more intense use of labour. The working hours are not increased, but the workers are made to produce more. However, the surplus value cannot be substantially increased by these two methods. c) According to Marx, there is a third and more important method of increasing surplus value. It is to increase the physical productivity of labour by technological progress. Technical progress implies improvement in the techniques of production by which a labourer is able to produce more, working the same number of hours as before. The result is that the total output of labour increases. Thus there is increase in surplus value, or the rate of exploitation. In this way, the working of capitalistic system results in the worsening condition of the working class. Marx calls it the law of increasing misery of the working class. According to this law, owing to technical progress, increase in capital accumulation and the consequent increase in national income

201

under capitalism, the relative share of wages in national income is bound to fall and that of capital is bound to go up.

Surplus value is basis for profits and accumulation of capital. The aim of the capitalist is to increase surplus value to the maximum. At first, when the supply of labour is large, wage rate remains constant at the subsistence level, but sooner or later, the demand for labour exceeds the available supply and wages rise, reducing thereby surplus value. With the loss of surplus value, there is a crisis‟, as the capitalist has no incentive to invest. He also tries to create again a surplus value of labour using labour saving machinery but this also is temporary solution as a too frequent resort to this device will lower the rate of profit and thereby reduce the capitalist‟s incentive to accumulate.

Thus, capitalism is doomed to fail and give place to socialism. This is the picture which Marx himself predicts on the eve of the fall of capitalism. He comments, “Along with the constantly, diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolies all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of working class, a class always increasing in number, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself……..centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.”202